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PMO’s chief of staff wrote to ethics czar about Carson

The Tory party is scrambling after reports that Harper’s one-time chief of staff sent three letters to the federal ethics commissioner about the activities of a disgraced former adviser.

In this 2010 file photo, the Prime Minister's Office chief of staff Guy Giorno prepares to appear as a witness at the Commons access-ethics committee in Ottawa. (Adrian Wyld / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO)

By Allan WoodsOttawa Bureau

Wed., April 20, 2011

FREDERICTON—The Conservative party is scrambling after reports Wednesday night that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s one-time chief of staff sent three letters to the federal ethics commissioner about the activities of a disgraced former adviser.

Guy Giorno is now the Tories’ national campaign director in Ottawa. But when he was working as chief of staff, he reportedly asked ethics commissioner Mary Dawson on three occasions to look into a possible violation of rules involving Bruce Carson, CBC reported.

The substance of the letters wasn’t immediately released, but the fact the PMO felt the need to consult the ethics watchdog suggests the government was concerned about the appearance of impropriety.

Carson was Harper’s long-time adviser and one of his closest aides in the Prime Minister’s Office before leaving government in 2008 to lead the Canada School of Energy and Environment in Calgary. He took up that job in the fall of 2009.

Giorno’s first letter was reportedly sent when Carson jumped on Harper’s election campaign tour in 2008 to advise his former boss. Another letter was reportedly sent when Carson helped Harper guide through a constitutional crisis later that year after opposition parties threatened to defeat the Tories and form a coalition government.

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The third letter involved Carson’s role as an unpaid adviser to former environment minister Jim Prentice in 2009.

Giorno wrote Dawson on Jan. 23, 2009 after concerns that Carson may have been lobbying for the school for a $25 million project while on unpaid leave from the school and working in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Giorno was flagging an email sent from Carson’s account at the school to a senior bureaucrat at the department of natural resources flagging the school’s intention to make an application under Ottawa’s Centres of Excellence program.

Carson was hoping to win a five-year research project for Carbon Management Canada, a program led, in part, by the school.

“We . . . hope that you will be willing to work with us to ensure that CMC is best positioned to move to full proposal,” Carson wrote on Jan. 6, 2009.

But the day the email was sent, Carson was working for Harper in Ottawa.

According to Giorno’s letter, Carson said the email was drafted while he was still at the school and sent in error after he took his unpaid leave.

Carson has cast a shadow over the Tory campaign after revelations he may have improperly lobbied on behalf of a water filtration firm that was seeking government contracts. His fiancé, a former escort, was employed by the company and stood to earn 20 per cent of gross revenue from any potential deal.

Carson was disbarred as a lawyer for stealing money from his clients, a crime for which he was sentenced to jail in the early 1980s. During the election campaign, it was further revealed that he has three additional fraud convictions from the early 1990s.

Harper and senior Conservatives say that they didn’t know about the more recent charges and would never have hired him to work in the Prime Minister’s Office had they known. Carson maintains that he disclosed all of his criminal convictions upon being hired to work for Harper.

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